Rand starts her ethics thusly:
What is the purpose of an ethics? To survive.
What is a human's primary means of survival? One's mind.
If one is going to have an ethics, then, it better darn well be built around the use and protection of the mind.
I am of course paraphrasing.
She's factually wrong:
What is the (evolved) purpose of an ethics? To pass on genes in a modular-minded top large-pack predator.
What is a human's primary means of survival? One's pack.
If one is going to have an ethics, then, it better darn well be built around working with one's pack.
Etcetera.
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You seem to be arguing yourself into groupism of some kind there. But really the naturalistic fallacy is all over both arguments. You can't derive an ethics from anywhere that you can touch. That's the problem, not a debate as to whether the privileged source should be your own self or your tribe, nation, all humanity, etc.
Leonard,
One path to ethics...followed by Rand, Aristotle, and a number of others...is naturalism. What is the purpose of ethics, therefore what should ethics be? At least insofar as one is going to make prescriptive ethics calls, I'm far more inclined to pull for naturalist ethics than intuitionist or subjectivist/emotivist ones. And as per > a dozen times here, I strongly prefer Schmidtz's take on naturalist ethics to anyone else's.
Mostly, thought, it was a dig at the Randian model of ethics that I once 3/4-accepted, but which I now think fails on multiple counts.
An ethics designed for and maximizing a primitive lifestyle tends to lead to one.
Rand's warnings were not that survival would be impossible, but rather that survival under the conditions we live in today would be.
Calling Rand a philosopher is like calling Dan Brown a writer.
It's insulting the professionals.
Why are Americans so obsessed with Rand? She's a third rate thinker. She was a good cult leader though, had the whole bully personality right there. Still, I'd rather follow an Indian guru.
Spandrell,
I disagree with your assessment, even though I know it's a popular one.
Why obsessed?
1. She was the most effective pro-capitalist anti-communist writer in the world in the mid-century. She is nearly single-handedly responsible for the existence of the modern capitalist movement. The libertarian party in the US was started by a gathering of folks influenced by two people: Rothbard and Rand. Overall...she has pride of place among the anti-communists.
2. Among philosophers since Hume(?) she's the only westerner who claimed at philosophy was relevant to living. A LOT of folks (myself included) found that very useful.
3. Have you read philosophical treatments of Rand. Mack, Hospers, Rasmussen, Den Uyl, Sciabarra? I'm inclined to call an assessment of her as 3rd rate singificantly underinformed.
4. Her Epistemology is excellent. Her ethics resurrected the Greeks.
Her politics, like those of Marx, are a major factor in the shape of the modern world.
Orphan,
Rand was very fishy on her meta-ethics. I'd claim that her meta-positions: meta-ethics, and meta-physics are the weakest of her serious positions.
Having read basically ALL of Rand, and most of the commentary... she at best wasn't very clear on that, and could be argued not to say any such thing, except perhaps once or twice in passing.
While it wasn't specifically a philosophical treatise, that's pretty much what Atlas Shrugged was all about; the incompatibility of groupist thinking with modern existence, and the entirely different set of ethics necessary to maintaining life as we know it.
The idea that collectivist thinking is primitive is scattered throughout her books, however, and she's pretty explicit in rebuking such thought patterns as animalistic rather than rationalistic.
I'd suggest she chose a poor prime value; sentience or perhaps sapience would be superior. The choice of life is appealing but ultimately unproductive.
Orphan,
I love Atlas Shrugged. Especially the speeches. And even more especially the characters. Francisco. Last time I tried to read it, though, I couldn't get past Ch.9 or so...cause I can't stand the physicist sellout.
As to Rand, she wasn't that subtle. She argued from a moderately anti-consequentialist point of view, with first principles.
I would agree with you that what you're saying is true. Tribalism is the problem. And anti-tribalism may be the core of the solution. But that wasn't Rand's argument. I don't want to pull out OPAR or PWNI and start chapter-and-verse-ing.
2. Rand didn't choose life as the prime value...she chose life as the standard by which one judges values...and she chose it by figuring out what is the purpose of having values. She was trying foundationalist philosophy. A=A implies free-enterprise without (much) government intervention. I think she fails...but that was her path.
A prime value, yes. The ethical equivalent of an axiom.
And it is pretty much her error. She used life as a repository of value to justify rationality. Doesn't work, because she plays fast and loose with the word "life." Sapience would be closest to the word as I think she was using it, simply because she expresses life as a quantitative measure - something that can grow and shrink without respect to the biological functions we generally consider life. (Her use of the word in describing the morality of animals I doubt she considered self-aware as a contextual necessity confuses the matter, however.)
Her philosophy, considered in these terms, becomes much more consistent, albeit a lot of her reasoning becomes unnecessarily redundant. (It also looks a lot more like some forms of Buddhism.)
Orphan,
1. Funny...an awful lot of my friends from my (big O) Objectivist days eventually decided that the Oist goals were mostly better served by Buddhist means than by Oist means.
2. I agree with you re: her main error as well. Fast and loose with "Life".
Objectivists by and large could do with more critical examination of their precepts. It's a really good base, but unfortunately a lot of them seem determined that Objectivism is what Ayn Rand defined it to be.
Her works are a very good starting point, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm frequently surprised when I go back and reread her works how many points I missed the first time through that I've arrived at on my own in the meantime. (Perhaps prodded along by the ideas embedded in the original reading.)
But her works aren't where it should end, and unfortunately too many Objectivists refuse to question her. In that sense many of them would refuse to identify me as an Objectivist. (In turn, I identify a lot of people as Objectivists who wouldn't self-describe that way. To me, it's more about how you live and how you think - the internal morality - not the rules Ayn Rand set down.)
It's a moral system with precisely one commandment - to think for yourself. It's bemusing how many of its followers regard such a thing anathema.
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